Flat slick Qi wireless charging pads, not so great it turns out
I’ve reviewed a bunch of wireless charging pads. Performance varies a bit between them but I’ve discovered one thing with the horizontal flat ones with no grips that seems to be universal – they’re unreliable in situations where they’re on a nightstand, near kids, or animals.
This wasn’t something I’ve really thought about until heavily adopting the Qi pads and today being the fifth time I’ve woken up to a dead or nearly dead phone.
Scenarios have been wife jostle table, phone moved half an inch, stops charging. Child pops into room, touches everything, phone moves. Someone walks by, phone slightly moves out of the charging zone.
The flat ones also tend to generate more heat as your phone is sitting on top of it and you’re burning away 30% of the power in conversion (no, that’s not particularly costly,) and that translates to some heat. Not that that’s a huge concern, you’re charging at a max of 1.5amps generally so we’re not into fast charge territory.
I guess my main point here is get a grip. Or make sure they have some grippy stuff on them to prevent the phone from charging. I’ve played with some pretty slick Qi chargers and, universally I cannot trust them in my environment.
Alternately get some of the tilted chargers. Most of them include heat dissipation fans.
